


we all walk the long road

by plingo_kat



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-02 15:27:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4064980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plingo_kat/pseuds/plingo_kat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the time comes, she goes alone. Valkyrie would have gone with her, she thinks, but Valkyrie was taken, screaming and fighting, eyes wild behind her hair as the War Boys held her down, white grasping hands around her wrists and ankles and knees, five days ago in the latest raid. It’s what finally spurs Furiosa to put into motion the plan she has been half-composing since the third incursion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Another fill for the kink meme! The [prompt](http://madmaxkink.dreamwidth.org/450.html?thread=58306#cmt58306) is: "AU - Max meets Furiosa who was never stolen from the Many Mothers. ALSO the Green Place never got polluted or turned into a creepy swamp full of crows. 
> 
> Furiosa meets Max in the desert & asks him for help sneaking into the Citadel to rescue another Vuvalini who was kidnapped (Maybe the Valkyrie or another little girl?) Furiosa needs a man so he can pretend to be her captor and get them inside. Max is reluctant at first but Furiosa persuades him.
> 
> Of course once they're inside they end up rescuing the Wives too, right?"

It’s the third raid in as many months. 

Furiosa wipes the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, smearing grease in a dark streak over her knuckles. All around her the response gang are checking their gear, taking inventory, dressing wounds and burns.

“How many did we lose?” Furiosa still feels scraped raw, chest tight with impotent rage and fear, and doesn’t look Valkyrie in the eyes when the other woman comes up next to her – even that too much of a confrontation.

“Three more,” Valkyrie says. “Fern, Carbin, and Jax. All dead, none taken.”

Relief makes Furiosa’s limbs weak before the hatred comes rushing back, all the stronger for her lapse. How has it come to this, that she is _glad_ that her fellows are dead instead of stolen to be breeders or slaves to the plague-rat king of the Citadel?

She makes the memorial gesture with a numb hand. _I’ll remember you_ , she promises the dead. _I’ll avenge you_.

i.

When the time comes, she goes alone. Valkyrie would have gone with her, she thinks, but Valkyrie was taken, screaming and fighting, eyes wild behind her hair as the War Boys held her down, white grasping hands around her wrists and ankles and knees, five days ago in the latest raid. It’s what finally spurs Furiosa to put into motion the plan she has been half-composing since the third incursion.

She packs enough supplies for a week – three days for scouting, one day each for travel, and some extra just to be safe – and heads out. The only one who knows where she’s gone is the Keeper, and she won’t tell so long as Furiosa is back in time.

Everything seems to be going smoothly, which is unexpected, until it most definitely isn’t going smoothly, which is much more expected. Furiosa crests a dune on her bike and runs straight into a killing. Three men have a fourth surrounded, the victim on his back in the sand _snarling_ like a mad dog. Furiosa recalls all this only after – she sees the glint of a gun in one of the would-be-killer’s hand and pulls her own weapon free. Two of the men are dead before she makes it halfway down the dune – the last gets one shot off before she kills him.

“You all right?” She keeps her gun up.

Silence. The man flinches away from her shadow, eyes wide. His mouth moves like he doesn’t know what he should be expressing, defiance or confusion, upper lip lifting in the start of a snarl before twitching still in a helpless twist. The one thing he doesn’t do is talk.

Furiosa steps closer. “What’s your name?”

Still silence. At least he isn’t growling anymore.

“This yours?” Furiosa tilts her head at the black beast of a car near the rise of the next dune. It looks like it’s been rammed – probably an ambush, the car looks well treated and the man is healthy enough – but will still run.

“Mine.” He scrambles halfway to his feet, swaying, and then can’t seem to get up anymore. His mouth moves, open and closed, before he spits out the word with a throat full of gravel. “Yes.”

Even exhausted and clearly in pain, he twitches like he’s got too much energy, hands fidgeting and eyes darting from place to place. He stares as her gun, then at her as she lowers it and extends a hand. It’s her prosthetic.

He takes it after a wary pause. “Thanks.” His speech is awkward, his posture hunched. Furiosa wonders how long he’s gone without seeing a friendly face, without having any sort of conversation. This is the time where she should nod at him, say goodbye and good luck and get back on the road, but she finds herself falling into step beside him as he limps his way toward his car. 

“Furiosa,” she offers when they reach it. At his furrowed brow, she clarifies, “My name is Furiosa.”

“Furiosa,” he repeats. His voice breaks halfway through the name and she looks at him sharply, finally seeing past the dirt and size and _threat_ of him to the state of the man underneath. His lips are cracked, his eyes red-rimmed. There is a gauntness to his cheeks that almost everybody has out in the wastelands. His limbs tremble faintly when he’s still, which isn’t often.

Furiosa doesn’t have much room in her for pity, but the Many Mothers do teach compassion.

“You have supplies?” She asks, abrupt. The man doesn’t seem to notice, just twitches his shoulder in what could be either acceptance or denial. “I got enough for two days drive. You can make it to a town with that, easy.”

The man grunts. When Furiosa just continues standing with her weight balanced, waiting for an answer, he uses words. “Why?”

Furiosa doesn’t do him the disservice of pretending not to understand the question. “I can help and it doesn’t cost me anything, so why shouldn’t I?”

He looks at her like she’s crazy. Maybe she is. The world is harsh, the people in it harsher, and kindness is a weakness. But she has grown up on stories of how the world was different once, and might be again – and she misses kindness, and gentleness, and the soft things that have been burned out of her with violence and fire. She has had to become hard to protect the Green Place, but she doesn’t want to be hard forever.

“You want it or not? I got places to be.” She doesn’t wait for him to answer this time, just strides over to her bike and wheels it over.

“Where?” Words seem to be coming easier for him now, and his twitchiness has abated a little. Definitely too long alone in the desert, she judges. He’s half-feral.

“None of your business.” She isn’t confrontational, but her tone makes it clear he isn’t to ask again. “Your car all right?”

In answer, he gets into the driver’s seat and turns the ignition. When the engine starts up in a purring roar, he gives her a thumbs up. The gesture is so incongruous that her mouth twitches up in a smile, and he smiles back at her before remembering himself.

“Trade,” he says when she makes to hand him a water jug. When she blinks at him, he shakes his head in a convulsive movement. “I’ll trade you,” he tries again.

She eyes him, the filthiness of his clothing and the flesh clinging tight to the bones of his face, skeptical. “Trade what?”

“Help.”

This time he doesn’t elaborate in the face of her crossed arms, her raised eyebrow. He just shakes his head at the offered supplies, mouth set. Furiosa wants to throw her hands up in frustration, wants to just up and leave, but some sense of mercy is holding her back. She caught of glimpse of his gas gauge – it’s hovering on empty, and the closest settlement is at least four hours away. If she leaves him here, with only the dead and his car, he won’t last more than a day or two.

“How can you help,” she says at last, after wrestling her temper down. Who knows, maybe he’ll surprise her.

“The Citadel,” he says. It comes out with bitterness and pain – it comes out familiar, the same way she says it, hatred clear in the words. “Inside. I can bring you.”

ii.

He shows her the raised skin on his wrists, welts dug deep into his flesh, the smeared brand on his neck above his spine. It is enough to convince her that they marked him for use as a slave, that he won’t sell her out. Hatred, she thinks, is almost as reliable as loyalty.

She doesn’t trust him, of course. She doesn’t trust anyone who isn’t of clan Swaddle Dog, who isn’t a denizen of the Green Place. She gives him just enough guzzoline to get him where they are going and a canteen of water for the trip, then gets on her bike. The ride is exhilarating – the roar of his engines behind her throbs in her chest, and it’s like having her own war machine, like she’s outracing an enemy and leaving him in the dust. They drive until the sun hangs low in the sky and make camp in a high rocky outcrop that only Furiosa’s maneuverable bike can reach.

“Tell me your plan,” she demands as she hands him some rations. He looks down at the food in his hands and back to her; he is asking for _permission_ , she realizes, and something twists in her stomach. She nods.

He eats with the careful restraint of the perpetually starving, thoroughly chewing each bite to make it last. When he makes to put some of it away for later, Furiosa reaches out to touch his wrist. He freezes at the movement and she withdraws her hand, the movement incomplete.

“There’s plenty of food,” she says, deliberately casual. “Eat your fill.”

He blinks at her, but eventually hunches back over the rations and eats another six mouthfuls. They chase the meal with swallows of water.

“Bring you in,” he says without prompting after they’re finished. “For a reward. Pretend. Then run.”

“How will we get out? Where do they keep the prisoners?”

“All women?”

“What?” The man’s habit of dropping words is strange, makes everything disjointed. She wonders if he’s just forgetting to say the rest of his sentences out loud. Then she understands the question. “Yes, everyone they’ve taken – alive – has been a woman. Some old, though. Too old for… breeding.”

He grunts. Produces a knife out of his boot, and she can’t help the reflexive grab for her gun. He looks at her, waits her out. When she lowers her weapon he bends his head and begins scratching a design in the dirt.

“Gate,” he says, drawing an X in the center of a curved line. It ends along a vaguely rectangular shape, both together creating a lopsided oval. “Cliffs.”

He scrapes out a cylinder with a skull at the top. “Garage, here—” A poke at the base. “Slave quarters. War Pups. Organic Mechanic. Mothers. Immortan Joe. Wives.” He notches the cylinder with each phrase, marking off the levels. 

“Water pipe.” He draws a long line up the center of the cliff, from the beneath the base to the top.

“Can we use it? Is it full all the time?” Furiosa leans in. She has heard about the Citadel’s wellspring, Immortan Joe’s powerful and jealously guarded treasure. He perverts even that which gives people life, withholding water until the people are mad with thirst, then releasing it in a gushing waste once a day. Her lip curls.

Max is already shaking his head. “Goes all the way up,” he says. “We’d drown. Here.” He taps at the gouge in the dirt that represents the Citadel’s garage. “War rig.”

“You want to steal a war rig?” Furiosa remembers the immensity of those tankers, their heavy armored grilles and enormous wheels, how they can carry an entire population of raiders or slaves, how they can take fifteen guzzoline lances and just keep going. She feels herself begin to grin.

“I like the way you think.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some gendered slurs and mild violence in this chapter. Also, discussion of sexual slavery. Nothing too unexpected.
>
>> “This is a fool’s plan,” she says after hearing him out.

iii.

They work out how their little raid is going to go in fits and starts. Furiosa will probably go to the slave pens, the man tells her. Secretly she has begun to think of him as Dog, with his scruffy hair and hunched over posture, his hidden desire to please, but doesn’t say it aloud. He will almost certainly be offended.

Immortan Joe won’t want a wife without an arm. Valkyrie has two healthy arms and two strong legs and beautiful hair besides, Furiosa informs Dog, so they’re going to need a way to get to where he keeps his women. She tries not to think of what he must do to them, up there in his skulled tower. She hopes she won’t be too late.

Dog says little, but she gets the idea that he is – something, not quite friends – with a War Boy, and that he can get the War Boy to let them out of the pens at night. Dog will be returned to slave status, most likely, even coming back with a prize. She isn’t worth that much.

She has to bark a laugh at that. She’s worth more than all the fighters in the Citadel, she tells him. Her, and the women Immortan Joe has taken, and him too. He’d better remember that. Dog nods at her, pretending indulgence, but the corner of his mouth quirks upward. Good.

Once they are free, they will take out the War Boy and collect the Vuvalini in the pens or among the Mothers and make their way up to the Wives’ room. The door is locked only from the inside – everybody knows what Immortan Joe will do to someone who touches his _property_ without permission. They will free the women, go down to the garage, steal a rig, and drive away into the night.

“This is a fool’s plan,” she says after hearing him out.

He grunts, then raises in eyebrows at her as if to say _and you have a better idea?_

She has to admit that she doesn’t.

“All right, Fool.” It’s a better name than Dog. Maybe. “Let’s go.”

They leave Furiosa’s bike alone in the sand.

 

Walking into the yawning dark of the Citadel Cliffside is like falling unconscious. Spots swim across her eyes and she blinks rapidly to clear them; the musty staleness of damp stone and sweat slaps against her skin. Beside her she can feel Fool tense up, his chain clinking with the flinching twitch of his shoulders.

“Easy,” she says under her breath. The wall-guard war party is boisterous and loud, busy exclaiming about their captured prizes – they don’t hear her. By now her vision has returned, and she watches a little bit of the panicked tension ease from Fool’s shoulders. It makes her feel better, somehow, more in control. She lifts her chin up higher.

“Where are they taking us?”

Fool just looks at her out of the corner of his eye. He shakes his head and stays silent. Furiosa gets the hint and doesn’t ask him again.

Before long they come to a room that has holes high up in the walls to let in sunlight. Too tall to climb to, not without risk of death by fall, and the outside is just more cliffside anyway. She decides to keep them in mind as a last resort.

“Well, well.” There is a man standing in the middle of the room. She has never been with so many men in one place, not without at least the same amount of women, and it isn’t a welcome feeling. This man is large and bearded, with a receding hairline that doesn’t give him an air of charmed absentmindedness like the historian they have in the Green Place. This man looks dangerous. White-painted boys melt away into the shadows as he approaches: _definitely_ dangerous, then. She grits her teeth and works hard not to bring her arms up to cover her chest. 

Fool takes a half-step forward. She glares at him; they agreed he wasn’t to draw attention to himself, since she would be the more valuable catch and thus more likely to live if anything happened, but Fool ignores her and stares the man down. He is trying to _protect_ her, she realizes, and buries her fear in a rush of anger. Fool is living up to his name.

“The Blood Bag is back.” The bearded man grins. “I always recognize my work, and the Organic Mechanic does good work."

Fool stays silent. His lip curls.

The Organic Mechanic laughs. It's an ugly sound, harsh and somehow derogatory, and it makes Furiosa's lip curl in imitation of the Fool's. The Organic Mechanic's eyes turn to her with the movement.

"Found yourself a bitch, did you?" He leers at her prosthetic, as if he can see the stump of her arm beneath the metal. "Brought her here hoping for safety?"

Furiosa clenches her jaw hard enough to make the muscles in her neck ache. _Silence_ , she repeats to herself. _Stay silent_.

Fool is faring better than her on that front. He keeps his face blank and his mouth closed even as his eyes burn with hatred; perversely, it comforts Furiosa to know that she isn't the only one helplessly enraged, that she isn't the only one biting back violence. She thinks of Valkyrie's face, her wide white-rimmed eyes as she was dragged into one of the Citadel's tankers, and uses the image to cool her anger into a more calculated fury. She can _wait_. Once her people are safe, she'll kill every abomination in this pustule-ridden cesspit that gets in their way -- and she'll start with the man in front of her.

"Hold her still!" he snaps suddenly, and a knife appears in his hand. Furiosa jerks away with instinctive, mindless reaction, but white-dusted hands appear from behind her to grasp at her wrists and calves. She freezes, quivering with tension.

"Not so brave now, are you?" The Organic Mechanic grins. His teeth are yellow and one of them is plated with chrome. "Don't worry. Immortan Joe doesn't like people to sample breeders, not even ones with missing parts. Not until he knows you can't give him children."

Furiosa doesn't have the self-control to stop herself from spitting on the floor. The Organic Mechanic backhands her across the face, hard enough to sting but not enough to do any damage. He has experience with doling out pain, she notes, shaking her head to clear the ringing from her ears. With a name like Organic Mechanic, she should have known.

She bears his hands on her because she has no choice. He pricks the inner bend of her elbow for blood, checks her teeth and pinches the skin on the back of her hand, unhooks her prosthetic and lets it drop to the floor.

“No branding today,” he says, voice heavy with disappointment. “Not ‘till Joe decides if he wants you. Not like our blood bag, here.”

He saunters over to the Fool, kicking her prosthetic out of the way as he goes. She grinds her teeth and tries to loosen the tension in her neck. She doesn’t succeed. Fool, too, is tightening up, shoulders creeping up around his ears, and he flinches violently as the Organic Mechanic touches the hem of his shirt.

At first Furiosa thinks they are bruises, but the darkness and clean edges of the ink make themselves clear as they are exposed to sunlight. She catches a glimpse of HIGH OCTANE and ISOLATE PSYCHOTIC before Fool jerks himself free. 

The Organic Mechanic laughs his derogatory laugh. “Take ‘em away, boys.”

Furiosa meets her Fool’s eyes. This is it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What?” says the War Boy. “You can’t. Only Immortan Joe goes in to see the wives, now.” He fingers two lumps on his shoulder at the base of his neck, each tattooed with three dots. “He even stopped letting Rictus in without him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The beginning of this chapter has a description of a feeling similar to claustrophobia. It's mostly over by the third paragraph. Everything else is pretty tame!

iv.

The slave quarters are at once more crowded and more isolated than what Furiosa is used to. Everyone is crammed together in the tunnels that make up their barracks, skin to skin like peas in a pod or bullets in a gun, but nobody talks to the others: each slave is embroiled in their own misery, their own private terrors, and has no attention to spare for their neighbor’s suffering.

The closeness of the air is incredible. She feels like she’s trying to breathe underwater, like her lungs are coated with motor oil. A person – a man, hair shorn and eyes sunken, bare from the waist up – is pushed against her left side as he stumbles on the uneven floor and she jerks away, nearly overbalancing herself.

“Easy.” Fool grasps her elbow, just the barest touch of fingers. His hand spans nearly the entire width of her arm. The feel of his calluses, the fine grit of sand between his skin and hers, is reassuringly normal. He tugs lightly.

She follows him down a narrow side corridor. Water, she is amazed to see, is beading up on the walls, cool and clear, and the footprints she leaves are not ground into the dirt but outlined with a wet shine. 

“What a waste,” she whispers to herself. The Green Place has this much water, but she knows her home is special. The Citadel has no green but what is supported on its clifftops, shares none of its wealth with its surrounding lands. This much natural water should be able to sustain a thousand people; instead there are a scant hundred, and more than half of those are dying of malnutrition or thirst.

Suddenly she wants to go _home_. The longing is sharp and lancing: she nearly chokes with it. Fool’s grip tightens on her arm as if he can read her thoughts. Ridiculous, of course, and she’s proven right when she looks up to find two old women blocking their way.

“Furiosa?” 

“Birdie?” It isn’t the woman’s real name. She has forgotten her real name, if she ever knew it, and it doesn’t matter because she is _here_ , in this place, the first of those Furiosa is going to bring home. “And Zara?”

The hot press of skin – on her forehead, on the back of her neck – has never felt so sweet. Their sweat is slick on Furiosa’s forehead, the dirt on Birdie’s hand transferred onto the hair at her nape. She is smiling so hard her cheeks hurt.

“Who’s your friend, girlie?”

She introduces Fool, who mumbles and twitches but also bows courteously over the two old women’s hands, which has them laughing, flattered and pleased. She tells them that she wasn’t captured, that she is here to break them out. To free the women of the Green Place.

Birdie and Zara exchange glances. “It’s going to be hard, girlie,” Zara says. Her voice is a rattle, shredded like she’s been out in the desert without water for days.

“What happened to you?” Furiosa blurts out. Her hand lifts, stills, falls back to her side. “Your voice…”

Zara lifts her chin and her neck scarf. A deep bruising runs around the base of her neck, welts raised along her collarbones and shoulders. Furiosa and the Fool both hiss on an intake of air.

“Collar,” Fool mutters. 

Of course. A heavy metal collar. Her heart pounds in her ears. “How,” she says, choked. How could anybody do this to another human being, to a sixty-five year old woman who sews tents and mends laundry for the community, who rode out to what would likely be her death to defend her home? _How?_ she wants to scream at the sky, at Immortan Joe, at all the war boys of the Citadel. How can you do this? To us? To yourselves? To the world?

“We’ll get you out,” she promises thickly. Fool nods, though it ends with a jerk of his head toward the further end of the tunnel. “Do you want to come with us?”

“No,” Birdie shakes her head. “We’ll find the others and tell them the plan, see if we can convince some of the more spirited slaves to provide you with a distraction. You be careful, girlie,” she adds. Keen eyes pin Furiosa in place before they move on to look at the Fool. “You too, boy. Take care of her.”

Fool nods. Furiosa does the same, and privately thinks that it’s more likely she will be the one taking care of her Fool.

 

The tunnel leads to another tunnel, and then another, and another, until Furiosa barely even knows which way is up anymore: let alone the East. There is no sunlight this deep into the rock, only the unsteady flickering of torches, the smoke they emit coiling up to lurk black and cloying along the ceilings. As they move they see fewer and fewer slaves. White is streaked here and there along the walls and the floor next to dirty rust-brown stains and the occasional crude drawing made in chrome. They are heading into War Boy territory.

When they reach a split in the rock the Fool freezes. He throws out a hand to stop Furiosa from moving forward, eyes darting from side to side, weight on the balls of his feet. Furiosa readies herself for a fight, but after a moment Fool relaxes again – as much as he ever does, anyway.

“Nux,” he calls, low and broken. It takes her a moment to realize it’s a name, not just a wordless vocalization. When nothing happens, Fool scouts around the floor for a rock and uses it to tap a rhythm on the wall. The sharp sounds echo within the close confines of the tunnel.

“What?” The War Boy melts out of the shadows, somehow not given away by his white-powered skin. Furiosa vows to keep a close eye on him in the future: if he’s stealthy enough to go unnoticed in this tunnel, he’s stealthy enough to be dangerous.

“Blood Bag?” The War Boy smiles, chapped lips cracking as his eyes widen. “You’ve come back!”

“Hm,” Fool says. The War Boy isn’t deterred – he all but dances around the two of them.

“What are you doing here, did Immortan Joe catch you?” He seems to finally notice Furiosa. “Did you bring back a _wife?”_

Furiosa bristles at the insinuation, but Fool’s rapid head-shake stays her tongue and her fists.

“Nux,” Fool says again. “I need to see Angharad.”

“What?” says the War Boy. “You can’t. Only Immortan Joe goes in to see the wives, now.” He fingers two lumps on his shoulder at the base of his neck, each tattooed with three dots. “He even stopped letting Rictus in without him.”

“You know where the door is.”

The War Boy’s eyes dart away, down at the floor, up at the Fool’s face, at Furiosa, away to the rock wall. “He killed the last one who touched it.”

“Let us worry about that,” Furiosa breaks in. She’s out of patience with this man; his presence makes her feel as twitchy as the Fool is. She keeps thinking about white hands pulling Valkyrie away from her, into the wasteland.

The War Boy looks at her nervously again. “I can show you where it is,” he says. “But that’s it. Then I’m gone.”

Fool nods. Furiosa fingers the knife sheathed along her thigh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anybody is willing to talk to me about plot and/or is willing to listen to me throw ideas at them asking if they make sense, please, [send me an ask](http://pushthequorumbutton.tumblr.com/ask) on tumblr or email me! This story is getting out of control, I only have a vague idea of where I'm going with the plot ahaha.

**Author's Note:**

> Please, come talk to me! :D
> 
> [pushthequorumbutton](http://pushthequorumbutton.tumblr.com/) @ tumblr
> 
> quorumbutton @ gmail


End file.
